Thanks for the inside skinny on the inside-outside theory. You are quite right on one thing–media execs will never get your excellent point. And I also agree on Yahoo.

But don’t tell those Googles that mantra, as there will be no living with them (and I would know–read my disclosure!).

Re: D: We are chock full right now, with only about two weeks to go. But you might want to know that we invite based on who asks us for an invite. Very distributed media of us. You’re on the list for next year now, since you asked so nicely.

Better?

What I mean is that media think of themselves as being on the inside, everyone else on the outside. This is what was said at the Online Publishers Association confab in London, where Jeffrey Rayport, brilliant ex-Harvard prof, lectured the assembled media execs about bringing the outside in. I argued the opposite. I said that media are not on the inside; they are not the center of the universe. We, t he people, are at the center and media must realize that they are on the outside, looking in. They must turn themselves inside-out. And when they do that — when they realize that they serve the people at the center — it changes their essential worldview and the architecture of media. But I’m not sure they can do it. In the link I gave in my post, media execs in London (notably, my friend Martin Nisenholtz of NYTimesCo) argued that their brands are still worth coming to; they still see themselves at the center.

I argue that that is thinking like Yahoo, like the last old-media company, which tries to control content and pay marketing expenses to get us to come to them and tries to keep us there as long as possible to force ads down our gullets until we burp and leave. Google is, of course, the first distributed media company. Their ad on my blog page makes me part of their extended network. That is how we should think in media, that is what we should ask: WWGD (what would Google do?).

So rather than trying to get people to come to media, media should go to where the people are. Think outside-in.

Better?